Survival of the
"Best and Brightest"

Dying to be thin: The prevention of eating disorders and the role of Federal Policy
Premise: Treatment and prevention of eating disorders must be a legislated priority

 First let me say what an historic occasion I think this is. I don't think that's an overstatement.  This briefing today attests to the  there have been in this institution in the last few years as more and more women have assumed leadership. What is exciting to me as a citizen of this country is that our intuition, those of us who work on behalf of  equality in society, that we women are adequately represented decision makers at the highest levels of government. The national agenda  in a way that is more thoroughly democratic and the fact that we're  about eating disorders in a place like this is a change from five  ago, when it was considered virtually un-American to question the  of thinness in public let alone to treat is as a matter of serious policy discussion.  So this is a truly great day for the health issues of  Americans being brought into the light. 
 My job is to flesh out a bit . . .  the sociocultural pressures on women and the cultural picture that I saw, not as a medical specialist, but as a young woman coming of age in American society, and as a writer that I addressed in my first book, 'The Beauty Myth.' I began to feel compelled to write about the devastating effects of anorexia and bulimia on women of my generation and younger . . . I began to notice at Yale, where I was an  that the best and brightest young women of my generation could barely get through the survival issues of their day, they could barely stay on top of schoolwork, barely stay on top of social relations  so many of them were starving themselves half to death or spending a lot of time vomiting compulsively behind closed doors struggling with eating disorders.  I realized there was a correlation between their ambition, their desire to be strong and perfect and their internalization of a cultural imperative that also involved keeping your body rigorously under control and living up to an extremely unnatural ideal. I began to take a closer look at what this ideal was that so many women were trying to live up to. It turns out that it's profoundly unnatural. Twenty years ago, as Dr. Ruth Striegel-Moore's slide so vividly showed, the average fashion model weighed eight percent less than the average woman. Today the average fashion model weighs twenty-three percent less than the average woman. 
 It's my argument that what I call the beauty myth, the huge cultural pressure for girls and women to live up to these increasingly anorexic norms, supplanted the feminist mystique that Betty Friedan described so feminism began to transform the landscape, and women asked for more power in the work place the ideals of beauty became more and more rigid as a way to undermine women's new-found confidence and authority. 
 I, unfortunately know all too much about anorexia from my own personal experience. The reason I wanted to question what was the conventional wisdom when I first began looking at this issue, was that when I remembered how I became anorexic, it wasn't a particularly neurotic process. When I was thirteen, perfectly average sized kid, a boy, Bobby Sherman, poked me in the stomach, and said 'Watch it Wolf' The implication was that I was getting chubby and I immediately did what Cosmo suggest that I should do. I went on a calorie-restricted diet. I was successful. Within two or three weeks, I lost five pounds, but I could also no longer eat normally. I had anorexia for a year. It was the most painful year of my life. At the darkest point of that year, I weighed 83 lbs. and I was 5'4'. My family doctor said he could feel my spine through my stomach. More devastating, perhaps, than the physical harm I was doing to myself, and I could not stop doing, was the psychological toll it took on me, because all the things I should have been thinking as a thirteen year old girl, adventure, what I was going to be when I grew up, my schoolwork, boys, travel, who I was, what the world, what awaited me in the world.  All those things were supplanted by thoughts about food. I dreamt about food. My entire consciousness was taken up by food. Now, thank god for that doctor when he told me by the end of that year that . . .  along with my family and feminist background allowed me to think that this is stupid, this is not worth dying for. And allowed me to force myself to consume more calories. As I consumed more calories, my mind cleared. It was a long process, but I was able to recover. This led me to examine anorexia in other ways than merely a personal neurosis. It turns out that what happened to me is not difficult to explain. While many things cause anorexia, so does calorie-restricted dieting. It's quite possible for victims of famine, for example, afterwards to resume normal eating to still be obsessed with thoughts of food and with body distortion as a physiological response to restricted calorie intake. 
 What is restricted calorie intake? In our culture, it is normative for women to be living on starvation diets. I looked at Holland in the famine after World War II. The Red Cross said this population was living on 1200 calories a day. This was semi-starvation and they rushed food supplements to them. Dieting centers, including the Beverly Hills Dieting Center puts women on diets ranging from 500-900 calories a day. Up to 6 months at a time. And the striking thing about the image of Dutch women, after World War II, is how sheik they looked by modern standards. So it's not individuals who are neurotic, who are sick, although in some cases, family and other dynamics play into it. It's clearly a cultural imperative that is weighing down on women and not on men.  That is sick, that is a distortion. And this is where a gathering like this is tremendously valuable. 
 There's something, by the way, that reinforces women having to live up to these norms, that has to do with the work force. Even if you think you are free to be at your own weight or your own size, very often there's what I have called the PBQ or the Professional Beauty Quotient in the workplace. In retail, in sales, not to mention the media, and television work, many women find this PBQ operating. Flight attendants have protested about this. Many women find they are expected to fit a rigidly thin ideal in order to stay employed. For many women, their appearance is a criteria by which their workplace abilities are measured. A woman in sales told me that she followed my advice in the Beauty Myth, let herself go to her natural healthy weight and she couldn't get work anymore. So this is illegal. And I would like to ask that one of the things we could talk about or consider in a legislative sense, is to reinforce, more seriously, the issue of noting that this is not a bona fide occupational qualification. As employment law would have it, a bona fide occupational qualification to be thin and conventionally attractive, that it is a differential expectation for women as opposed to men. And that as such is an illegal employment issue. 
 Finally, I want to ask you to consider the political fallout of this — why it is important for you to treat this as a political issue. Anorexia and bulimia as an epidemic is working as a sort of political sedative on our daughters' generation, young women coming of age, young women of college level. This generation should be the future leaders of America.  Instead of being strong and creative and full of resilience, so many young women I speak to on college campuses, again the best and the brightest, are barely making it through at a level of survival.  Because they're exhausted.  And they're exhausted because they're starving or they're exhausted because they're vomiting compulsively. This generation's voice is diminished, they're reasoning powers are blunted. And this is America's future leadership. All the more reason to take it seriously. 
 Finally, we need to take this seriously because American parents are at a loss. They ask me how they can protect their daughters, ,hat can they do?  I have some suggestions for your consideration, some possible ways to approach this in the policy arena. Number one. Consider regulating the modeling industry. So many models are adolescent girls. They use 14 year-old girls and tart them up to look 35 and it's common knowledge in the modeling industry that models have to keep their weight down through drug abuse, through smoking, and through anorexia. If you have doctors making sure that these employment conditions were safe, meaning that women and girls did not have to maintain their weight at starvation levels in order to work, and to make sure, for instance that models were still menstruating, that they were not starving so much that they were , then you go a long way to make sure that an industry that  American girls is not using American teenage girls in a punitive  abusive way or to maintain that ideal. 
 Another thing you can consider is certainly an awareness campaign. Enlist rock stars, Jewel, Alanis Morrisette, to get the message out  looking like Kate Moss is not worth dying for. And the reason that  kind of awareness campaign is so important is that girls are getting their cues about what's socially acceptable from the authority of culture.  What I was desperate for, what allowed me to recover was an authority figure, my doctor to say 'It is OK for you to eat.' That's why if Congress says, 'We take this seriously, lets make this awareness campaign that treats this as seriously as a drug addiction issue and tell our daughters that you are too precious for us to let you starve yourselves to death or blight your bodies in this way.' That gives girls coming of age a sense that an authority in the culture, the highest authority says we want you to stay healthy, we want you to eat, we want to help you. 
 I think you should consider how useful in the past, how successful intervention has been in beauty issues. For instance, Kessler did some very important work with breast implants, the cosmetics companies anti-age claims. Now as you see, Phen/Fen is causing deaths in women.  American women deserve as consumers to have safe, consumer attention paid to the industry that preys to their insecurities. And if you enforce, for instance, the  of work with dieting companies, making sure they are not defrauding  and getting women to do something dangerous and unhealthy such as extreme calorie-restricted diets, then you go a long way not only in stemming this epidemic but giving our women, and most importantly our daughters the message that they are to precious to waste themselves in the pursuit of this unhealthy, and I would say, this anti-woman ideal.  Thank you very much. 

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